Правда на вес золота? Обсуждая золотодобычу в Монголии начала ХХ века Текст научной статьи по специальности «Философия, этика, религиоведение»

СТАТЬИ

УДК 338.45(517.3)(09)

Д 44 © Дейвон Диар

ПРАВДА НА ВЕС ЗОЛОТА? ОБСУЖДАЯ ЗОЛОТОДОБЫЧУ В МОНГОЛИИ НАЧАЛА XX ВЕКА*

*(Исследование по этой статье выполнено при поддержке фонда Генри Люса при Американском Совете по изучению Монголии и SSRC международной исследовательской диссертационной программе)

Данная статья анализирует то, как в начале XX в. сформировалось легитимное знание о золотодобыче в Монголии. Автор рассматривает то, как монгольская элита и Циньская администрация соревновались в создании правильного представления о реальности.

Ключевые слова: Монголия, династия Цинь, добыча золота, заработок, номадизм, эпистемология.

Devon Dear

IS TRUTH WORTH ITS WEIGHT IN GOLD? DEBATING GOLD MINING IN EARLY 20TH-CENTURY MONGOLIA*

* (Research for this article was supported by the Henry Luce Research Fellowship from The American Center for Mongolian Studies and a SSRC International Dissertation Research Fellowship)

This paper explores the ways in which legitimate knowledge was determined and how inferences were made. The author considers how Mongolian elites and Qing administrators competed for what constituted an accurate representation of reality. Keywords: Mongolia, Qing dynasty, gold mining, livelihood, nomadism, epistemology.

At the turn of the last century, in the frozen mountainous reaches of northern Mongolia, people were congregating. In a region described as an "out of the way place" by Chinese in the administrative center of Urga, newcomers from Siberia and Mongolian profit-seekers joined together in hundreds of small gold-mining operations. As the ground thawed, large pits were opened and soil - so filled with gold that even two decades later American geologists marveled at the density and size of the nuggets - was washed in buckets and makeshift wooden wash plants (Miller 1922: 11). As the Qing empire faced increasing financial pressures due to foreign indemnities and the costs of internal rebellions, many in the government identified Mongolia's gold - formerly mined only sporadically, and never legally so close to the border with the Russian empire - as a physical "source of profit" (Ch: li yuan) for the ailing state.

The four outer aimags that made up Khalkh Mongolia were no ordinary part of the Qing dynasty, however. Largely forbidden from settlement by Chinese, Mongolians were subject to a variety of laws that blocked their participation in commercial activities and attempted to restrict migration - from either interior China or Siberia - as to maintain the purity of their landscape. Gold mining and its attendant issues - immigration, environmental degradation, increased social disorder and wage labor - was forced to account for its effects on the ill-defined but pervasive concept of "Mongolian livelihood." To manage the relationship between gold mining and this amorphous concept, various groups, including Mongolian elites (jasak, taiji, gong), centrally-appointed administrators in Urga and Uliyastai, various bureaucratic offices in Beijing, and the emperor and empress dowager.Proper policy stemmed from properly identifying the "truth" of the mining's relationship to the amorphous "livelihood," or "what accorded with reality." This paper explores the ways in which legitimate knowledge was determinedand how inferences were made. By eschewing intentionality - as found in motivations like "greed" or "corruption," or otherwise seemingly obvious political motivations - it attempts to begin a social epistemology of an abstract object by parsing under what conditions something like "livelihood" could be said or grasped.

This case of placer mining in northern Mongolia draws attention to broader issues of how states and people know abstract objects such as "livelihood" or "the economy". It is a sweeping but safe proposition to write that nearly all studies of states, and in particular colonial administrations, take as axiomatic the proposition that states desire information. Whether or not they acquire this information evenly or efficiently matters little to the underlying assumption that governments and those who fill their ranks desire to render places and people "legible," and in the process to "make up people," whether this be through practices such as census-taking, taxation, or ethnic classification. The primary goal of these disparate enterprises was, in James Scott's formulation "to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion" (Scott 1998: 2). Empires may have been less efficient at gathering information than nation-states, or have needed only certain types to fulfill the taxation requirements of their subjects, but base need for information remains unchanged.In reality, however, governments were faced with a preponderance of information from censuses, petitions, tax registers, and other routine correspondence with their subjects.How did administrators sort out the true from the false? How was this information used to define abstract spheres of knowledge, such as "livelihood" or "the economy"?

How information was deemed verifiable has not been the usual subject of historians. 'How states know' is most often elided in favor of 'what states know,' or often, 'how their goals make them know within certain frameworks,'for example, in Scott's legibility metaphor (Scott 1998). More specifically, it assumes that states, particularly empires,distort information to reason self-interestedly, as in Edward Said's Orientalism and the many studies it has influenced. The flipside of self-interestedcolonial knowledge is what

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called "sanctioned ignorance,"which "every critic of imperialism must chart" (Spivak 1988: 291).In these formulations, there is a moral judgment about knowledge - in Orientalism it is knowledge of the Islamic world mobilized to further colonial power, in Mitchell and countless others schemes of legibility designed to make regions more amenable to both colonial and capitalist exploitation. These excellent and influential studies of colonialism have emphasized the ways in which administrators refashioned landscapes to make them more amenable to the needs of both state and business. Internal disputes or conflicts between state and capital were not absent, but the seemingly clear goals of these state schemes - control and extraction - also give rise to equally clear methods of doing so.

In the case of Mongolian gold mining, however, Mongolian elites and Qing administrators competed for what constituted a legitimate reason and an accurate representation of reality. How this reality was made was a complex process in which various ways of knowing (first-hand observation, recourse to biological traits or cultural stereotypes, and political calculations). To connect the ways in which states managed information and how abstract concepts came into being, this article proposes an "epistemic" approach, which focuses on evidentiary justification for claims and policy.In this article, I do not refer to an episteme in the Foucauldian sense (Foucault 1966) or a "paradigm" in the Kuhnian sense (Kuhn 1962), which both denote larger fields of knowledge and practice. Rather, I refer to the inferential process through which individuals make inferences about conditions of truth and falsehood, or, what constituted the appropriate criteria to be a justified belief. Given that historians necessarily work with documentation (archival or otherwise), access to the interior - that is cognitive - processes are off-limits. There is an obvious difference here from most ways in which epistemology is understood, given that the interiority of the inferential process is nearly entirely lost when one relies on historical documents. Put in Kantian terms, most basically while intuition would be offlimits to historians, thinking - what makes possible the concepts through which one forms judgments - is possible. For example, while we have no sense-data in the strictest sense, we do have reports of sense-data based justification (reports of starvation, for instance). Therefore, while I take some liberties with the term epistemic, I nevertheless argue that it is a useful term in that it focuses our attention upon the specific processes of justification rather than broader cultural or sociological definitions, as in Scott's approach which contrasts the ill-defined concepts of "intuition" and "practical knowledge" with "scientific knowledge" (Scott 1998:327). Through attending the terms around which debates were framed, such an approachadds specificity tobroader theories of difference, specifically what Peter Perdue has identified as "culturalist" or "racialist" explanations of difference in Qing history, in which certain commonalities were sought out with various subject peoples, or identified their different lifeways from stemming from more materialist, and therefore inalterable, conditions (Perdue 2009). Such broad, largely ahistorical categories, however, do little to elucidate the specific ways in which certain schema were made possible at various points in time.

Mining the Mongolian Border

Mining - primarily of gold, but also of a smattering of quartz and silver -was a widespread practice throughout southeastern Siberia and into the northern regions of Mongolia, primarily around the Orhon and Iro Rivers. Unlicensed gold mining had occurred in northern Mongolia from at least the mid-17th century, although it is quite possible that it began earlier. Under the guise of hunting and fishing - legal subsistence activities for border populations according to Qing law - locals made their way across the border, digging new exploratory sites on as they pursued their other, "nomadic" or "hunting and fishing" livelihoods. According to legend, it was a group of Evenki hunters in deep in the thickets of the northern Manchurian forests who discovered the first pieces of gold that led to the eventual establishment of the Mohegold mine in the late nineteenth century (Mohejinkuangyangejilue 1918). The nineteenth-century decline in the profitability of the fur trade meant that most who continued to hunt and fish in southern Siberia were Buriat, Evenkis, and other indigenous groups, as European emigrants farmed or worked in the urban sector (Ushakova 2006). Therefore, the local, supposedly noncommercial population spearheaded 20th century mining as both guides and participants. Seasonal small-scale mining was, like black-market trading, one strategy in the range of non-subsistence oriented activities through which people supported themselves (Edinarkhova 2005). It was not one, however, that central governments in either Beijing or St. Petersburg paid great attention to.

In contrast to the claims of early 20th-century foreign observers and some contemporary Mongolian historians, some Mongolians did engage in mining, despite taboos about digging into the earth in one's home region (Boldbaatar 2002;Gagengaowa and Wuyunbatu 2003; High and Schlesinger 2010). According to Sh. B. Chimitdorzhiev, Mongolians in the SainNoyanaimag had themselves begun to join the search for precious metals beginning in the 1870s (Chimitdorzhiev 1986: 24). The first known large-scale Russian attempt to mine Mongolian gold was not spearheaded by a corporation, but by a local grouping of several hundred Cossacks and impoverished people (bedniaki) (Darevskaia1994). Similar to sizable, multi-ethnic smuggling networks and cross-border raiding parties, poor men - and very occasionally women - of the border region joined together in an attempt to make a living.In 1891, nearly 300 Cossacks and poor men wintered along the Ononriver, and began their search for gold in the spring thaw. In 1898, Shishmarev, the Russian consul in Urga, also reported that Russians were mining in the Terelj and Kerulen regions, but that their numbers were negligible (Darevskaia 1994). To Russians, Buriats, and Khalkh Mongolians in the border settlements, rumors of the vast riches contained in Mongolia's interior lands were began to recirculate in the 1870s, and increased in the 1890s. As V.F. Liuba, then a representative of the Ministry of Foreign affairs, informed his colleagues in 1897, "thanks to the exaggerated and great rumors about vast riches hidden in Mongolia's interior, plundering instincts (Rus: khishchnicheskieinstinkty) and the desire for fast and true profits have taken possession these last years of our border population" (Darevskaia 1994). Similar rumors circulated around the

Priamur further east, as scattered reports of not only Russian troops but small village settlements of Russians planting small gardens and digging artisanal pits began to pile up from the 1860s (KWD 7 2380: 2381).

Scattered accounts of Russians, Buriats, and Mongolians panning for gold trickled up to central Qing authorities before the official opening of Mongolor, but there is no evidence that they were of great concern. It was also known that Chinese migrants from interior provinces who claimed to be farming in northern Mongolia's fertile lands were also "pilfering" (Ch: touwa, lit. "stealing-digging") gold dust (KWD 8 2787: 4895a). As subsistence activities and animal husbandry were the expected activities of nomads, the details of digging the earth and panning its water - much like unlicensed trade - fell largely outside administrators' realms of concern. While these illegal practices were not unknown, they comfortably reproduced the image that Northern Mongolian territories were rife with "widespread malpractice" (Ch: liu bi), in which the entire financial and administrative landscape was in a state of chronic degeneration.

Profit's Source

Debates about mining had some basis inunderstandings about the relationship between profit, morality, and precious metals. The financial pressures faced by the Qing state following the indemnitiesand the financial toll of a number of internal rebellionscontributed to a shift in how many Qing statesmen viewed the northern border regions. Previously strategic buffer zones against the encroachment of the Russian empire, numerous officials memorialized to the Guangxu Emperor that these areas could be transformed, either through agricultural land reclamation or mining, into profitable regions. In many discussions of mining along the Mongolian-Manchurian borderlands, the state's "source of profit" (Ch: li yuan) was quite literally equated with the physical ground of Mongolia and Dauria. Compared with trade, in its seemingly physical connection between mineral wealth and national profit made mining a particularly appealing option for shoring up revenue for the ailing treasury, pointing to the role precious metals continued to play in what was still a "hard money world" (Von Glahn 1996). Regarding mining in Manchuria, the governor general of Jilin, Zhang Shun memorialized to the Guangxu Emperor:

[We should] draw up plans and dispatch an official to test opening up mining in order to dredge the source of profit. [I] respectfully submit a memorial for imperial consideration. In my opinion (qiewei) mining the five metals is the basis of the profit of heaven and earth and the natural world. If [we] can truly obtain [them] in this way, it will be easy to find a manager and enrich the nation and satisfy the people. All on the basis of this, thus it is not necessary block an insatiably avaricious heart. (KWD 7, 2403: 3999a)

The equation became so direct, that profit's source was described being "dredged" (jun), making the association between physical resources and profit's source complete. The same phrase was used in the Mongolian context by those in the Foreign Affairs Office as well (KWD 8 2800: 4929a). As the

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profits were natural, garnering profit from them was also morally righteous. While not explicit in this passage, the derogatory term here translated as "insatiably avaricious" (tan bi) was most often applied to Russian aims in the region. Mining was, in Manchuria as it would be in Mongolia, naturalized as a part of enriching both the state and people's livelihood. Moreover, the joint-stock corporations necessary to capitalize mining operations did not change the basic conception of all land as the sovereign's, with the Guangxu Emperor making it explicitly clear as he wrote that "across all the land, there is none that is not the sovereign's"(KWD 8 2806: 4943b). The distribution of wealth through shareholding was a familiar form from Chinese joint-stock firms in Hong Kong, Shanxi, and a number of other regions, and did not inherently alter the perception of to whom this wealth, in the end, belonged. Concessions were given for exploitation, but not for formalized ownership. In the context of aggressive foreign economic demands along the Qing empire's edges, the choice to exploit mineral resources and maintain China's "economic sovereignty" (li quan) became an urgent matter.Those in the Foreign Affairs Office (Waiwubu) suggested"we ourselves should establish and open up [mining] in order to expand the source of profit and moreover to preserve livelihood," (KWD 8 2798: 4925b), and in more dramatic terms, exhorted that "the country is in urgent need. As for everything that benefits the national economy and people's livelihood, they must without exception strive to be precise and penetrating," and to find a way to maintain economic control over Mongolia's mining resources (KWD 8 2796: 4920b).

The triangulation of national economy, mining resources, and livelihood positioned Mongolian livelihood as something for the first time within the realm of national interest. This posed a very literal relationship between unlicensed digging and "theft" from the state. Officials in Beijing were aware Chinese were going to Mongolia under the guise of cultivating land but were in reality "pilfer-digging" (touwa) for gold (KWD 8 2787: 4895a).The association of the national economy with Mongolian resources allowed for the bifurcation into legitimate and illegitimate spheres of profit, mirroring the broader distinctions of public good (gong) and private interest (si). One reason that Lian Shun and other officials proposed that Mongolian elites opposed mining was that they were not receiving their share of the profits, even proposing that some of the Mongolians who opposed mining did so because, in the current arrangements, they were receiving no profit from it, writing "because it does not benefit them personally, they sow discord from the middle" (KWD 8 2796: 4920a). Contrary to the state's desire for profits from mines, which would benefit both the broader national community and "Mongolian livelihood," these Mongolians were presented as covetous and greedy for increased salaries from the state.

The association of mining with the national economy also connected "Mongolian livelihood" to the well-being of the nation. Mongolian livelihood was not only potentially being blocked by mining, but was also perceived to be itself in hard times. One benefit that proponents of mining put forward was that the profits generated from mining could be used to mitigate Mongolian hardship. "At this time the national treasury is lacking"Lian Shun during his tenure in Uliyastai, "and maintaining Mongolian livelihood is difficult.

Obtaining these unforeseen funds will not be without some benefit" (KWD 8 2782: 4916a). It would, he maintained, benefit both the people's livelihood and the national economy (Ch: guoji). "The Mongolian population continues to grow, and their livelihood becomes pressed day by day," wrote members of the grand council in Beijing (KWD 8 2787: 4895b). "If we can truly open up profit's source (Ch: li yuan) there would be benefit for Mongolian banners."

Although officials wrote Mongolian livelihood in conjunction with the national economy, what precisely constituted Mongolian livelihood was never formally defined. Without returning to the "guidance and constraint" of Whorf-Sapir hypothesis - namely, that linguistic structure makes certain thoughts unthinkable -refuted by Wardy, or even Matteo Ricci's frustration before what he perceived as the infinite ambiguity of Chinese language, a lack of precision-definitions that could be expressed in basic logical notation, such as 'for every x, x' - was the norm in imperial Chinese philosophical discourse. Chad Hansen has gone so far as to claim that "Chinese philosophy has no concept of truth" (Hansen 1985: 492). Rather than truth, Hansen argues that pre-Han Chinese philosophy rests on pragmatic interpretations rather than those that are semantic (truth-based). Although Hansen's focus is on classic Chinese philosophical texts and not on early 20th-century bureaucratic documents (not all of which examined here are in Chinese), his argument is worth brief attention. Supporting his claim that classical Chinese philosophy lacks a concept of truth, he writes that "the fact that Chinese philosophers 'go on' primarily in pragmatic rather than in semantic ways justifies the interpretive claim that "truth" is absent from the Chinese philosophy of language" (Hansen 1985: 495). While grand judgment about fundamental assumptions of language and philosophy is well outside the scope of this paper, I take Hansen's point as a challenge for how true propositions were formulated within one specific historical Chinese context, and most importantly, within ordinary language.

This allowed for Qing administrators and Mongolian administrators to employ a term in two different ways, even if both shared a base understanding of "livelihood" meaning "not falling into destitution". The very abstraction of the term - not falling into destitution, and with herding at its base - made the precise conditions of its harm equally hard to pin down. Interestingly, the usage of livelihood across the three languages in use - Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian - in context does not differ (grammatically and syntactically, it does). Whether or not all three of these terms at all times refer to precisely the same thing is a different problem, and a careful, longitudinal study would help elucidate. Nevertheless, it is worthtrying to make sense of livelihood in rigorous terms, one could employ Gottlieb Frege's sense and reference distinction (Frege 1892). Using the example of the expressions 'the Evening Star' and 'the Morning Star', both of which refer to the planet Venus, Frege was able to demonstrate that although both expressions have the same referent (Venus), their meaning is not identical. For Frege, expressions with the same meaning must also have the same reference, for example, "Moscow" and "the current capital city of Russia." However, expressions with the same reference may have different meanings, such as "typhoon" and "hurricane". The meaning

of these two terms relies on more than the reference itself. We can take the parties involved as using "livelihood" with a common reference. The most reasonable working definition for this would be negative, as in "not destitution," seen in phrases like "[our] method of livelihood was sufficient" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.1 2446.44b) in reference to the amount of livestock present at a given time. These correspond with other uses of livelihood of border populations, such as land-cultivating Manchu garrisons in the northeast. Other examples in which livelihood had a reference would be the statement "Mongolian lands all take nomadism as a livelihood (menggu di fang junyiyoumuweishengji) (KWD 82803: 4939a). Here 'nomadism' is an attribute of 'livelihood'; presumably the sentence could be written to read 'Interior regions all take agriculture as a livelihood'. Moreover livelihood here is an attribute of place.I provide these examples to demonstrate the ways in which Mongolian elites and Qing officials used the term themselves, rather than to assign a reified, rigid definition.

Continuing with Frege'ssense and reference distinction, however, one could posit that 'livelihood' had meaning, but no reference. In Frege's usage, an example of this would be the sentence "the first house on the moon." Let us take the most common usage of "livelihood," namely the reference to hindering the livelihood of Mongolians (Ch: you aimenggushengji/Man: banjin de goicukababisire). Although livelihood is reported as blocked, what that livelihood is not the focus of these sentences. These sentences are not nonsense, as they were deployed in ordinary language and understood by the concerned parties. Even without a clear reference (the definition of livelihood), these statements have meaning.

Livelihood was a term employed by Mongolian elites themselves in both Mongolian (TERM) and Manchu. Take, for example, this complaint by WHOM, which connects livelihood and "natural order" (Man: abkaidoro). Take, for example, this complaint by a Mongolian official in an affected area:

All people who herd depend on grasses, and there are various kinds of hindrances made to the Mongolian livelihood....the population of my Mongolian place formerly felled lots of wood, therefore damaging [the land], it did not accord with the way of nature (abkaidoro), which is guarding the basis of the land. After meeting with the scent of hunger, the people and livestock encountered bird sickness (gashanimeku), because of carrying out various kinds of mining, how can the people and livestock in the places [in which mining takes place] escape from hardship (jobolonsuilacun)...(MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.11: 4b)

This statement expresses similar concerns about mining's harm on a broader, more abstract Mongolian livelihood dependent on the availability of natural resources. It shows that discussing a Mongolian "way of life" was not foreign to some Mongolian elites themselves, at least when speaking with the Urgayamen and therefore Qing officialdom. That such an object as a "Mongolian livelihood" existed was not in question. Even if there existsana priori metaphysical basis for the hardship - a natural order from which Mongolians in this region had deviated - the chain of reasoning is quite straightforward. Herders depend on grass, and mining has further exacerbated

the situation of the pasturelands' deforestation and degradation. What exactly "bird sickness" here is unclear, but cowpox outbreaks were frequent in Mongolia in this period (Potanin 1898).

Like the contemporary term "economy," "livelihood"had physical dimensions in the sense that it could be blocked and expanded. The oppositions to mining reported that mining hindered Mongolian livelihood (Ch: you aimenggushengji), which became a set phrase in the documents circulated between Urga, the court, and the Foreign Affairs Office. This phrasing is not unique to mining, but is routinely used in relation to physical hardship. The devastation of a 1909 forest fire near the Russian border was also described as "greatly blocking Mongolian livelihood" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.1 2414: 6a). This lack of definition was not insignificant for Mongolian mining, because its lack of detail about what constituted a "nomadic livelihood" and how mining was concretely affecting it, made external conditions - such as stereotypes about Mongolian stupidity -equally relevant to establishing the truth-claims of mining's damage. Thelack of specificity in what constituted livelihood is in opposition to other colonial practices, such as in British rule in Fiji where "through the process of description and specification, the report constituted Fijian society as an entity" (Thomas 1990: 156).Unlike these more familiar colonial examples, Mongolians' livelihood required no such specific enumeration.

Livelihood in context: evaluating mining's impacts

After a series of unsuccessful negotiations about building a railway, during Li Hongzhang's 1896 visit to St. Petersburg on the occasion of Tsar Nikolai Il's coronation, he finally agreed to a Russian concession for mineral resources along the Qing's northern border (Paine 2009). Following his agreement, in June of 1897 the St. Petersburg International Bank established the "syndicate for researching the mining resources of China," which was capitalized at 500,000 rubles. In Mongolia, the Urgaamban notified Tusheet and Cecenhans in Urga, along with the assistant governor-general, that mining experts and tools would soon be entering the mining sites in their territories (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.5). From 1898-1899, a small exploratory team was assembled in Urga to prospect along the Iro and Kerulen rivers, followed by French engineers and other skilled miners (Darevskaia 2004).

This small exploratory force was the first official Russian delegation to dig for gold, and perhaps received the first licenses sold by Lian Shun, then the Uliyastai governor general. By June of 1899, Ukhtomskii had brought a petition before the Russian Ministry of Finance to turn Grot's Mongolian concession into the "Russian stock organization of Mining of the Tusheet and Cecen Han aimags in Mongolia," more commonly known as Mongolor. Officially established as a joint-stock operation in January of 1900, it began activity in Mongolia on March 11, and had its regulations ratified by the Ministry of Finance in April of the same year. Capitalized at three million rubles, the size of the mining concession attracted the attention of English officials, and on June 30, Secretary of the Legation stationed in Beijing, Henry Bax-Ironside, reported the concession and a translation of the original Russian

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proposal for mining, that roughly sketched its boundaries, being "On the west, the great road from Urga to Kiachta. On the east, the OnonRiver.On the south, the great road from Onon River to Urga.On the north, the Russian frontier." Mongolor'sconcession seemed, to both officials within the corporation and foreign observers, to be sealed.

Although Li Hongzhang and the Zongliyamen (the office in charge of foreign affairs in late imperial China) had pushed forward Mongolor's concession, various factions in Beijing - including the empress Dowager herself and members of the Grand Council - continued to proteste a Russian joint-stock company within the sensitive northern border. Around Urga, as licenses went out, rumors began to spread about to what extent, and by whom, mining sites were going to be opened. Both merchants and those living near mining sites inquired about how shares could be purchased, if the joint stock company was actually going to form (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.31:1a). Moreover, a series of complaints came into the Urgaamban's office from Mongolian in the Tusheet and Cecen Han aimags, reporting that their tribute and livelihood was being blocked. The first known reports came in May, almost immediately after the tickets were given out (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.9: 2a).

In the early hectic months of gold mining - rapidly pushed through as those in the Foreign Affairs Office feared that the Qing state's chance for profit would "slip by" (Ch: zuoshi), many from the highest levels of governance to the locality complained of the hectic and confused process of opening up the mines. As complaints began to come in from jasaks in the gold-producing regions, Mongolian leaders in Urga - the "chiefs" (culgan-i da) of the four aimags, the JetsundambaKhutuktu, along with the prince currently managing the karuns, Lamujabsurun, and the official in charge of Kiakhta traders (kiyaktu-ihudaiirgese be kadalarajurgan-ijanggin) Weling assented to the expansion of gold mining (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.1). The Cecen Han had received LianShun's request three months prior, and took it to be an imperial edict, given that they thought it had an imperial rescript on it. What followed was a rapid opening of new mining sites. Opened without fanfare, the initial procedure was to put a few stakes in the ground "hanging Mongolian words to explain" that these sites were going to be mined. Local documents from these initial months demonstrate the rapidity in which this was pushed forward without any external evaluations of the mining sites or consultation with local officials. Even years after mining had begun, populations living near the mines were not clearly informed about the details of the operations. Russian and Buriat miners would arrive at the mine sites, begin to dig pits and wells, and set up homes. Their licenses, however, were rarely, if ever, written in Mongolian. Local Mongolian officials from a number of karuns protested this, demanding that although Shishmarev himself did not know Mongolian, the licenses and the envelopes they were sent in needed to be in Mongolian so that local officials were aware of their content and could better judge their veracity (MUUTA M.1 D. 1.4 7453.2). There is no evidence that this took place, however.

The petitions that came in from Mongolian elites at the mining sites generally share common complaints, namely the high tolls on the water and

timber supply that mining took. Mining did not only require digging pits in the ground and therefore digging up potentially valuable pastureland. It also required large amounts of water for washing the gold from the dirt. The jasaksNafangsihur and Namsarai from the Cecen Han Tusheet Han aimags, respectively, both reported the detailed consequences of this digging. When miners first arrived in their territories and began to set up pits, the neighboring livestock was routed around these sites into the more mountainous surrounding areas, where "deep mountains were bound up [with] much mud and slime (haksanalinsiradumelifaciwalabdubime)" and they were not able to pasture their animals (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.12a). Miners in these two regions began to dig wells in the remaining level and solid land. In three areas under Nafangsihur's jurisdiction, totals of ninety nine, eight, and nine wells were dug, along with 156 gold-mining pits themselves (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.12b).

Rather than expressing a distinctly "Mongolian" way of understanding, these reports are remarkable for how closely they approximate the kinds of reports submitted from local officials to superiors within the bureaucratic chain of command in other portions of the Qing empire. Local officials - the so-called "small officials" (Man: buyahafasa) - attempted to manage the situation to the best of their abilities. In addition to counting and reporting the number of wells, they kept their own records, "having recorded a true approximation of the amount mined (Man: yargiyanambamuru da aisinfeteheba-i ton de acahabi)" and the amounts of newcomers entering their territory. They recorded one Russian and five Buriats. They also recorded their belongings -six horses for riding, eight bags of pelts, a sack filled with cloth, a rifle, two iron spades, one iron awl (used for making holes in the ice), and three pickaxes used for digging into frozen soil, and finally an array of wooden tools. With these tools, they chipped as far as possible into the permafrost in an attempt to unlock as much water as possible. The jasakNamsarai from the Tusheet Han aimag, near the Buorakarunsubmitted an equally detailed report about five Russian-subject Buriats (orosburiad) who had entered his territory to mine.

Nafangsihur, Namsarai and others were clearly careful to report details to the court, and in general, these complaints provide little in the way of abstraction or recourse to emotion. If anything, they generally display the same bureaucratic attention to detail as other routine correspondence in the Qing empire. To demonstrate to the court that their livelihood was indeed being blocked, these jasaksemployed familiar, first-hand evidence.The rhetorical mimesis with other official communications is striking. They are notable for their quickness to note specific quantities - for example by citing the number of wells and the give routine inventories. Such eye-witness accounts that rely on detail - often numeric - to bolster their legitimacy strongly resemble Qing official documents, which routinely attach addenda and lists (Ch: dangse, qingdan), and in which the first-hand report was a commonly-deployed and respected form of evidence. Moreover, throughout the rest of the mining period, Mongolian elites reported engaging in the same type of record-keeping of state officials. The isomorphism was also relevant in bookkeeping practice, where we have scattered evidence of indebted Mongolians keeping accounts in the same manner as Chinese firms (Pozdneev 1897). One of

the more unusual documents held in the Central Historical Archive of Mongolia is a hand-bound ledger in Manchu and Mongolian entitled "A register of incidences not yet handled relating to foreign countries" (Man: tulergigurun-ibaruholbobuhaicihiyarawacihiyaraundebaitaicese), which reads as a short list of Russian misdeeds, such as constructing homes and crossing the border without permission (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.22). Compiled in 1900, the list begins during the Tongzhi reign (1862-1875) and names only four cases, which only a cursory glance through the yamen's own record book shows is woefully incomplete. Relevant to the Mongolian complaints, however, is the similarity of how the cases were presented, namely recording the number of houses constructed illegally, for example (fifty in 1868 near the Kirankarun).Officials at both the local and central levels of the Qing administrative structure in Mongolia demonstrated similar recordings of unlicensed happenings at the mining sites.

The converse of complaints of newcomers and their associated disorder was local elites' attempts at reinstating order. In the chaos that ensued from Mongolor sites' rapid openings, the jasak described the complicated process through which a Russian ataman passed had a bilingual Russian-Mongol license through a series of karuns until it reached him. Others simply reported that the mining boom was resulting in the rapid construction of Russian homes in their jurisdictions (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7130.30). Mongolian elites at the mining sites made efforts to manage increase in crime and disorder through the regular means of distinguishing the head bandit from the followers, and punishing them accordingly. This included in some cases beheading for the leader, and three months in the cangue for underlings (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.11:6b). So far there is little here to distinguish the ways in which Mongolian complaints were formulated from their other imperial counterparts. They used clear, often numerical evidence, and appealed to the general desire for stability. They underscored the hardship that average people endured due to mining's effects, such as the loss of land that lead to hunger and wandering populations (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.11:4b).

For some officials stationed in Beijing, these reports were deemed sufficient to at least establish doubts about mining's impact on livelihood. For example, when Lian Shun countered Mongolian complaints that mining had "no relation to the herding areas," the Urgaambannevertheless repeated the claim that Mongolian princes had reported otherwise, and that because mining took place in areas that were both watery (near to rivers) and in mountains, this in fact affected the four tribute animals that, dependent on the season, grazed in all areas (KWD 8 2971: 4909b). Although the amban's term was brief, he amalgamated the responses that entered his office and did report that mining brought increased pressure on local resources due to the rapid influx of the population. His solution was to dispatch yamen officials to investigate the extent of these claims. The account by his informants confirmed the information presented in the initial Mongolian reports, reporting 156 "privately dug" pits dug in the region.In both form and content, the reportwas nearly identical to those submitted by the Mongolians, and recounted an encounter the runners had with six Russians who had built homes high in the lofty mountains, in an area accessible by only a winding path (M. 1 D.1.4 7023.14/15).

There were no drastic discrepancies in the type of information or the way in which it was presented between the Urgayamen and Mongolian elites. What was not resolved, however, was the relationship between mining and livelihood.Late imperial Chinese administrators would have had access to a broad and sophisticated body of knowledge about water-management techniques, particularly in regard to river management, canal construction, and irrigation (Leonard 1996; Zhang 2008). Its canon of water-management literature was neither hedgehog nor fox - officials had both a conception about the general importance of water management to the stability of a state, as well as the specific relevant technical expertise. While the ecosystem of the arid steppe and even the boreal forest was not the ecosystem about which most Chinese water-management and agricultural science had been produced, the sophisticated water management was not a foreign concept to Qing administrators. Glimpses of the ecological knowledge of Qing administrators occasionally came through, as when it was reported that mining did not necessarily need to take place in areas with "watered pastures" (Ch: shuicao), and is not connected to areas with livestock (KWD 8 2791: 4909), or that mining regulations were routinely drawn up across the empire as to not impede either water or fengshui (geomantic principles) (KWD 8 2796: 4921). Expanding upon Ernest Sosa's claim that an intellectual structure can be reliable in regard to one field of propositions and unreliable in regards to another (Sosa 1991), in relation to water management and its relation to mining, such information was not, in Sosa's terminology, "reliable" in northern Mongolia. In the realm of lived experience, the livelihood of herders was connected in some degree to access to pasture and water was not, therefore, what Ian Hacking has identified as an "inaccessible classification" (Hacking 1995b), meaning a term with which the classified could not interact. Moreover, those who reported being overrun by incoming miners - whether Russian, Buriat, Chinese, or Mongolian, presumably from other regions - and being unable to cope with the influx of new immigrants into their jurisdictions, were living in the midst of rapid demographic change. The influx of newcomers for mining would have been exacerbated by permissions given to Chinese to rent land in northern Mongolia. These plots were located near the mining sites, in the Orhon valley and along the Iro River (Maiskii 1959). Either writing about livelihood within these terms contained a broad enough resemblance to lived experience, or a "looping" effect in which the external classification became internalized as a part of self-definition (Hacking 1995b), or, most likely, a combination of the two.

The Urgaamban and others in court, however, did not take all Mongolian complaints about the environment at face value, however.In addition to the accusations of corruptiondiscussed above, in response to those positions that focused on balancing the potential profitability of the mines with the problems posed by foreign shareholders, the Empress Dowager responded that "It is not a calculation of comparative amount (Ch: feijijiaoduogua)." Rather, the major concern of the court was "losing Mongolian hearts" (KWD 8 2791), and that Mongolians had been receiving imperial grace for over two hundred years

(KWD 8 2796). Such kind of references to the receipt of imperial grace were common in communications between the emperor and his Mongolian subjects (Atwood 2000). Other emotional reasons were proposed for Mongolian resistance to mining whose validity did not rely on eyewitness accounts of the current situation, such as when the Urgaamban reported that Mongolians felt "fear and dread" towards Russians, and thought the presence of non-Buddhists on their land would be detrimental to Buddhism (KWD 8 2791: 4907). This statement was not supported with any evidence, whether first-hand or through Mongolian testimonies, and whether or not some Mongolians resented the presence of non-Buddhists does not discount the profuse examples of Mongolian-Russian cooperation, or acts of theft - such as a Mongolian stealing the wire from a telegraph pole and going to the Russian border to look for a suitable buyer (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7130.33) - that make any such emotional blanket statements untenable. Another reported that the hardship "aroused the consciousness" of the Qing state, and that the emperor "loved and worried for the hearts of the Mongolian masses" (KWD 7 2806: 4943b)The Uliyastai governor general and Urgaamban responded that the court's emphasis on "Mongolian hearts" was demonstrative of its "caring intentions" and the emperor and court's "sincere concern" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.10:6a). Indeed, some orders did come down from the Court of Colonial Affairs that called for the temporary movement of personnel so that appropriate officials could be dispatched to provide the eye-witness accounts that would help the organization ascertain the true situation (M.1 D.1.4 7084.8).

While these statements do not refer directly to 'livelihood,' they are demonstrative of another aspect of the debate over Mongolians' role in mining.For the empress and other officials, making a decision about mining required more than the facts gathered from the mining sites themselves. Through these scattered references, there are glimpses of livelihood's further elaboration through its relationship with non-subsistence activities, such as trade. In regard to Mongolor's concession, officials referred back to past mining incidents' effects on livelihood. For example, in 1759, gold mining sites had been set up between the Iro and Hala Rivers. A chain of events ensued, in which crowds gathered and there emerged signs of human habitation (Ch: renyan), goods circulated and were brought in, which "necessarily lead to the gradual loss of the old foundation (KWD 8 2791: 4908a)." It was because of this that livelihood was blocked. As with the 18th-century case referenced by an official above, the hindrances that nomads faced were often ill-defined, found somewhere between an increasingly encroaching market and physical obstruction in the landscape. The circulation of commercial products in mining regions was a consistent source of worry for central administrators through the end of the dynasty, as mining regions became new centers for the distribution of goods.

Stereotypes of Mongolian stupidity and lack of logical reasoning abilities provided a source of justification outside of what was directly observed.From Uliyastai, Lianwas quick to dismiss these complaints, writing that "no detailed reasons [regarding] what kind of tribute, and what kind of livelihood were clearly reported (Man: aihacin-ialbanaihacin-ibanjin be umainarhunturgun be getukelemetuciburaku)" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.10: 1-2). The reports they

had been sending to the Urgayamen, he claimed, were deliberately muddled and obfuscating, and that "what [they] reported did not accord with the truth (boolahanggeyargiyan-iacanaraku)". Moreover, "because Mongolians inborn nature is exceedingly stupid (yin mengrenfuxing duo yu)," the Foreign Affairs Bureau wrote to the emperor, "they cannot avoid confusedly talk about fengshui" (KWD 8 2800: 4930a). The official continued on to say that "in reality," the problem was that Russians were digging illegally.

The innate nature of Mongolians as greedy or stupid, respectively, renderedreports false in two different ways. Either they werepositively false (a falsehood affecting the predicate, namely 'blocking livelihood') or false due to faulty inference (the information reported was accurate, but the interpretation about blockage was not). Neither of these two conditions, however, necessarily negated the need for accurate knowledge of the mining sites. This lack of certainty about "true" conditions plagued officials involved with mining until the end of the dynasty in 1911. In order to ascertain whether there was a "true" (yargiyan) hindrance to Mongolian livelihood, the Court of Colonial Affairs in Beijing requested in early 1901 that the Urgayamen dispatch officials to the mining region (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7082.2:1). Lian Shun, then governor general in Uliyastai, seconded the suggestion of the Court of Colonial Affairs for the Urgaambanto dispatch "officials who both knew the Mongolian situation well and were conversant in [Mongolian] speech and script" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.28: 1b). When someone was sent from the Urga office to do an eyewitness account, their reported sided with the governor general's, in that while they saw "several thousand" pits dug for mining, as well as a stone canal for bringing water, they did not see any "hindrances" on the pastures, besides, they pointed out, the "corruption." Many years after mining had begun, the same focus on accurately recording the amount of extraction for mining sites remained. Certain aspects of the mining process did invite calls for greater precision, including both numerical outputs (for revenue) and better maps for identifying the exact location of the mining sites. Cartographic knowledge was a problem during the first years of mining, and the initial map drawn in 1901 marked the sites only vaguely situated near the Orhonriver. It was not the kind of map that one could have followed as a road-map, and provided no more information than what was already available in writing (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7084.34). Even as late as 1907 the names and exact locations for the "five sites" near the Orhonriver were not agreed upon. In 1907, von Grot wrote to the Urgayamen requesting that the names of the stations located at the pits be recorded "in detail," because the lines between Mongolor's official concessions and the widespread unlicensed pits remained unclear (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7453.4).

From Livelihood to Crisis

Despite the multiple objections to gold mining, including both blocking Mongolian livelihoods and the potential problems of Russian shareholders in the sensitive border, the desire for profit and the fear of Russian repercussions

for taking a financial loss on Mongolor, gold mining was entirely legalized by 1906. The solution to the problem of Mongolian livelihood was decided by early 1901, and was twofold: first, to give fifteen percent of the mines profits to Mongolian elites for distribution to their subjects in the mining regions, and second, to hire Mongolians at the mining sites. This solution was accompanied by a dropping off of concern for livelihood within the protests and debates. 'Livelihood' was largely replaced with the Mongolian 'crisis' (Ch: ji), to which mining would provide a relief through the two avenues listed above. Instead of addressing limits on drilling wells, the density of placer mines in a single region, or wood shortages, a profit-sharing scenario was decided upon as the best route to alleviate Mongolian poverty.

Subsidies were not a solution that appeared only in 1906. A stipend system to elite Mongolians had been in place since around the time of the empire's inception. Whilethe court did not want to block the "livelihood" of Mongolians, it could easy solve the problem by "wetting" them (Ch: zhan), that is, giving them the auxiliary benefit through profit-sharing (KWD 8 2806: 4943b). This approach - solving the problem of hindrances to the "Mongolian livelihood" through payments - was eventually agreed upon as the solution, as Mongolians elites in the mining regions were included in the profit-sharing schemes from the mines. Although distributing funds to hereditary elites did not directly address the problems of resource shortages or social disorder, the empress dowager wrote as early as 1905 that "Mongolians always have a habit (xiqi), that when something comes up they distribute funds to the households in their banners to cope [with the situation] (KWD 8 2806: 4944b)." In the third month of 1901, at the behest of the Court of Colonial Affairs, a banquet was thrown for the Tusheet and Cecen Hans and the requisite "registers and documents (Man: dangsecaga)" were put in order (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7084.8: 3a). Problems with Mongolor's own profitability and disputes over the concession's terms soon officially shut down Mongolor's mines, but these agreements laid the groundwork for the arrangements that were reached with the mines reopened in 1906. New regulations for the mining sites were drawn up in 1906. These were supposed to better deal with the social problems caused by mining, namely migrant workers without permanent homes, theft around mining sites, and how wealth was to be distributed between the Qing government, the shareholders, and local Mongolians. Although the regulations addressed the problems of housing for migrant workers, what is noticeably absent from these 14 statutes are any references to the concrete raised by Mongolians from 1900 - 1901.

Although some opponents of mining, both Mongolian and non-Mongolian, linked livelihood with pastureland, this coexisted with another understanding of the term. Just as livelihood could be "blocked," like profit it could also be expanded (Ch: guang, Man: badarambumbi). Some responded that employing Mongolians as laborers at the mines would serve this purpose.Suggestions of this appeared in the earliest debates about mining, such as the imperial edict discussed above. Foreigners at the mines were not to exceed twenty people, and Mongolians and emigrant Chinese should be employed in order to "expand their livelihood." Mines should be used to "take advantage of feeding

impoverished people (with) work" (KWD 8 2806: 4943b). Certain eye-witness accounts, some as early as 1901, only strengthened the belief that wage labor could improve Mongolian livelihood. One inspector, sent from the Urgayamen to the mining sites near the Orhonriver, presented a very different image of mining's effects on the regionthan the petitions by the regions' jasaks (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.29). While this report confirms the rapid transformation of the landscape, including new housing for both Mongolian and foreign workers, it describes that apart from the foreign mining experts, "those who dig the sandy earth are all Mongolian, and those from the interior (dorgiba-iirgenniyalma) work as paid workers, [and] Mongolian people's livelihood is expanded" (MUUTA M.1 D.1.4 7023.29).

The perception of livelihood as something with bounded - that could be "wetted" and "expanded" - helps to explain why payment was perceived as a valid solution.According to the Zongliyamen's regulations, profit would be distributed as thirty percentto the Board of Finance, fifty percent back to the shareholders, and the remaining twenty to Mongolian nobles in the regions that were being mined, although the actual numbers vacillated over time (KWD 8 2803: 4939). A Mongolian supervisor, Cerindorj, was appointed to be the liaison between Mongolian elites in the mining regions and Mongolor officials.Once the Tusheet and Cecenhans and jasaks in the affected areas agreed to their share of the profits, the issue mining's impact of Mongolian livelihood was essentially closed. Lian Shun was condemned by those in the Foreign Affairs Bureau for his handling of the Mongolor concession due to the delays, and therefore profit, it caused the entire operation. The complaints of blocking livelihood did not disappear, as the re-legalization of mining brought increased traffic on Mongolia's roads, injuring people and livestock in the process, and water continued to be a scarce commodity (KWD 8 2925: 5078).

The decreased emphasis livelihood from mining discourse draws attention back on to the beginning of this article, and the new relationship established between the national economy (guoji) and Mongolian land. Explaining the court's support for the Mongolor concession, the empress dowager wrote the following statement

[As for] this current challenging crisis of a hundred calculations, the court is of one mind to revitalize it and has set up the Foreign Affairs Bureau in order to solidify neighborly relations. Moreover it has established the Central Office (zongju) to expand the source of profit. Those at this current axis are all willing to cooperate. All will benefit in this time of crisis. Develop the essence (jinghua) that the land itself possesses. Provide [what is needed] for the nation in crisis (KWD 8 2799: 4927a).

It was clear by 1906 that northern Mongolia's gold-rich soil was to be one part in a much larger mosaic of state-wide initiatives. As the Urgaambanex-plained it in 1909, "the gold dust that is obtained every year first [will make] the national levies (guoke) without defecit, and then will aid the Mongolian people" (KWD 8 2930: 5082b-5083a). Once mining was underway, the procedural concerns, regulations, and methods for accurately accounting for and distributing the profits took prominence over any issues of livelihood or

even poverty. As the difficulties in transforming Mongolor into a profitable situation continued, questions of just how similar Mongolia was to China's interior provinces would be raised again (KWD 8 2909: 5058a).

Conclusion

Conceptualizing Mongolian resources as a part of a"national economy"did not result in increased legibility of on-the-ground conditions in Mongolia. While local Mongolian elites and centrally-appointed administrators vied for competing versions of what constituted the truth, this did not result in the state's increased knowledge of local conditions. This was not due to a disparity between local and central ways of representing information - whatever the internal discourses about mining, there is evidence that Mongolians of many socioeconomic backgrounds participated in mining, and that Mongolian elites communicated with Qing government using the same types of evidence and argumentation. The details of these protests were, on the whole, unheeded, and the eventual solution to the problem of blocking the "Mongolian livelihood" was to include Mongolians elites within the profit-sharing from the mines. This harkened back to an older tradition of providing subsidies to elite Mongolians, or generally to providing relief money (xuqian) to impoverished populations across the empire. The "epistemological worries" that so often accompany colonial administrators and other purveyors of authoritative knowledge were absent in this case. By relegating Mongolia to abstraction, perhaps the Qing state avoided the "parathentic doubts about what might count as evidence," as Ann Laura Stoler has found in the Dutch colonial archives(Stoler 2009), drawing attention to the multiple ways in which imperial powers produce knowledge, or non-knowledge, about their peripheries.

Works cited

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Диар Маргарет Дейвон - кандидат наук, Гарвард.

Dear Devon - PhD, Harvard University.